How I learned English :-)
A couple of days ago I caught a rerun of The Golden Girls - and I have to admit, I love the show. First, it is just really funny - Dorothy rocks! The other reason why I like it is because it taught me colloquial English (together with The Cosby Show). Growing up in Germany, almost everything on TV was dubbed, there was almost no way to hear anything in original language, and while I appreciate it for non-English languages, I would have loved to see more TV in English.
Luckily, Cologne was close enough to the Netherlands so we actually were able to receive a couple of Dutch channels. There was too much on that I cared for - I am pretty sure it was public television mostly showing news and Dutch TV shows, but they did air The Golden Girls and The Cosby Shows - and boy am I glad it was those shows. Not only are they fun, I also believe that both use relatively proper and well pronounced English. In addition, they had Dutch subtitles and while I don’t speak Dutch, it often helped to figure out something I didn’t understand.
I was an English major in high school, mostly because I wasn’t able to pick German as my first major but had to pick a foreign language or a science. I picked English because it is pretty much like German class but in a different language. And boy, did I NOT do well. I remember that my teacher Mrs. Hellmund while handing out the graded papers said “You start out nicely but after about a page you are really losing it” to which I replied that I’ll try to stick with one page the next time. My biggest issue was that I tried to construct my English sentences like my German sentences but then I got lost in the grammar. The first page was find because it was just the intro. Once I reached the interpretation part, my brain took off but my language skills did not follow.
Now, on a completely different note, in Germany there are always those people who tell you that you have to watch this movie or read that book in original language and I always think it’s bull. Yeah, if your English is very very good, you may be able to pick up on some nuances that may not have been translated well into German but to be honest, for the vast majority speaking high school English - they lose a lot more information due to the lack of vocabulary than they gain by hearing the original language.
And of course, the recommendation usually comes from someone who is convinced that “he can English very good”. Most of the time, I find this recommendation pompous and condescending and I would never recommend it to anyone who wants to watch a movie for entertainment. Now if someone wants to improve their English, it’s a great idea - worked for me, right?
New semester and how to hide posts in Wordpress
As I mentioned below, I am not too busy right now but luckily my class has started, and I am really excited. In case I haven’t mentioned it, I am going to Davenport University part time for a BS in Computer Science. Davenport offers a couple of different specializations in the CS area, and I chose Web Development. With a little luck (well, it’s more about being able to pay for classes), I will graduate in April 2010.
Currently, I am taking CISP238 (Server Side Scripting I) and I am really interested to learn more about this. I have dabbled a little bit with Javascript, PHP and Perl, but never enough to really be able to code.
I assume by now, half of my translator colleagues fell asleep but I really want to write a little bit about school stuff here but straying to far off-topic and boring the non-geeks. Searching around, I found out that you can set up Wordpress so that certain categories don’t show up on the main page. The topic exists, you can select the category and see it, it just won’t get into your main page or in your feed. I really like that and I think it may be of interest for other people too. I got the instructions from Jangro 2.0. I had a hard time finding the category ID but it is explained on the Wordpress Support Forum.
Now, I just created a category called Davenport University and selected that to be hidden from main page and feed. I did a quick test and that actually worked, you may still see the first test topic since I created it first and then added the code to hide the category.
Merry Christmas
Believe it or not, I am sitting at work - Heiligabend (Christmas Eve). This has to be a first for me.
It is so quiet, someone is playing holiday music but to be honest, I’d rather be home. Unfortunately, I had wasted away my generous ration of 15 vacation days by September and since then I am trying to get by. Fortunately, I have the best boss ever (and no, he doesn’t read this) and I will take my laptop home and work from home between the years. I have collected some chores that I can easily do from home but I can still get emails and generally “be available”.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Yule, Kwanza, Diwali or whatever makes this time of the year special to you. All the best from me to you!
What a deal!
Just found this at Tiger Direct:
Doesn’t make much sense if the sale price is higher than the “Compare at” price. Other than that, gimme gimme gimme!
Christmas Cups / Weihnachtstassen
Yeah, it’s old. Yeah, it’s German. Yeah, it’s lame. Yeah, I love them and it wouldn’t be Christmas if I wasn’t smiling at the cups. And year after year I am surprised that I still get a kick out of them. It is probably because I don’t have to watch them over and over.
Here we go: